Cascade (13 page)

She gave in to a hankering for a cup of tea even though she knew that the idea of a cup of tea—sitting still, calmly sipping—was more appealing than actually sitting still and trying to calmly sip. She didn’t even really like tea, she decided, watching it steep. She sat down with it anyway and spread out the morning paper. All bad news. There were two separate stories about the Dust Bowl “black blizzards” of April, witnesses describing how day turned to night, the thick dust clouds blanketing crops and sending birds and people racing ahead of it. Wet sheets in the windows, both articles said—everyone was pinning wet sheets over their windows to try to keep the dust from getting into their beds, their kitchens, their food, their eyes, their hair.

Wet sheets in the windows, a black sky raining dirt. Her mind began composing an image: left side of the canvas—a cutaway, diagonal view of clapboards. The primary focal point three wet, gray, spattered sheets.

Sometimes an image was enough. It was all about curiosity, in a way. Could you make
this
happen? Could you do with your hands and a brush what your mind’s eye had already painted?

Can I make that view up through water convey, to the viewer, how frantic the grasping-at-life instinct must be, how precious the air on the other side?

It was enough to get her back to her palette. Then it was bristles into paint, paint onto canvas, over and over, and a good hour went by, maybe two, branches, bark, light, all claiming their place on the canvas and becoming something more than the sum of parts.

When the 12:30 train from Athol blew its whistle, she looked up. Jacob was late, unless the train was early, and the train was never early.
Maybe he’s not coming after all
, she thought with relief that was quickly replaced by disappointment. Then she couldn’t help but be expectant. She lost focus, putting brush to canvas only to realize she had no real intent, that her mind had wandered, that she had become overconscious of any noise that could be Jacob’s truck coming down the driveway.

But he didn’t come and didn’t come. At one point she slipped into the house to check the clock. A quarter after one. He’d never come so late, never not come without phoning.

He did turn up, an hour later, stumbling out of his truck to deliver the news of Dr. Proulx’s death, a death that was strange, that would have the town talking for weeks.

He found him, he said. Found him in his bed. “Dead,” he repeated, as if she needed convincing.

He had gone to Dr. Proulx’s office to deliver the painting. “Dottie said he was late and wasn’t answering his telephone. She said he was probably caught up on a house call, but I said I’d stop by, make sure he was okay. His car was there. I knocked and there was no answer, so I went in and that’s when I found him.”

Dez was thinking it was sad, but a blessing, too, to die of old age and to die in your sleep, but Jacob was shaking his head as if she didn’t understand.

“He must have taken it to bed last night,” Jacob said, “this rag soaked with ether.”

And that was the unfathomable shock of it.

Jacob explained how after finding him, he’d gone directly to Oberon’s but Henry Oberon wasn’t there so he went to the police station to find Dwight and Wendell. “They said he was upset at the meeting last night.”

“He was.”

“But surely not enough to do a thing like this.”

“No,” Dez said. “Although,” she added, thinking back, “he was acting odd another time I saw him.” She explained how she had bumped into him on the common on her way to meet Abby’s train. She should have paid more attention, but she’d been in a hurry. “He’d been drinking. No question. And that wasn’t like him, especially since it was morning. Ten o’clock or so. He was clearly upset about something.”

No, she didn’t know what. “Still. How does a person do such a thing?” Lie down knowing it was for the last time? What if there was panic, a too-late change of heart?

“Who can say what makes a person do a thing like that?” Jacob reached into his pants pocket and took out a package of cigarettes. He lit one and looked off across the water.

Random memories came: the wooden box of lollipops Dr. Proulx kept on his desk. The silver clasp in the shape of a badger’s claw on his black bag. The flu mask over his face the day he emerged from the sick room, like he must have emerged from countless rooms that terrible fall, telling her that Timon was gone and her mother was not far behind, and that she would have to be brave. She’d wanted to kick him. She’d run crying to Rose,
I hate him, I hate him
. Aware that he could hear her and feeling guilty then, because really, all he’d ever been to her was kind, and his only son had died too, somewhere on the western front that everyone talked about, and his wife never came out of the house anymore.

From inside the house, the telephone began to ring. “Come in,” Dez offered. Who cared if Asa came home now and found him there? Everything had changed. “Or sit on the porch there, whatever you want to do. I’ll get us some water.”

It was Asa on the line, his own dismay so thorough he didn’t register Dez’s lack of surprise as he filled her in. Since there was no family left to decide the funeral arrangements, Henry Oberon was organizing the details, he said. And a group of ladies were getting together in the basement of the church, to cook for the funeral. “They’ve already started. I’m sure they’d like it if you came in and helped.”

“Right,” she said in a noncommittal way. She would cook something on her own, bring it to the church later.

“Jacob Solomon found him.”

She looked out the window to where Jacob sat hunched on the porch swing, looking down at his shoes.

“Terrible,” she murmured, “what a terrible scene for anyone to discover.”

He was quiet a moment. “Let’s never go to bed fighting again.”

“No,” she said. She never wanted to wake up to that kind of sick remorse again.

Jacob set the glass of water she gave him on the floor without tasting it.

“Do you want something stronger? I can make coffee.”

“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t look fine. His eyes were vacant, fatigued.

“The shock of finding him will stay with you awhile.”

“It wasn’t the fact of finding him so much as it was realizing what he’d done. At first I thought he’d died in his sleep, and that sort of thing is a blessing, really.”

Dez said that had been her first thought, too.

“I wouldn’t have even found him if I hadn’t done the painting so quickly. But then poor Dottie would have found him. It’s better it was me.”

“True. Where’s the painting now?”

“In my truck. What was the point, I thought. He had no family and I hadn’t taken any money. Not that that would have mattered, I just mean—”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“You look different,” he said absently. “Your hair.”

“Oh, that.” Her hand traveled to it, lamely. Why did people always have to do that, touch their hair, when someone else commented on it? The scraped-back look made her face sharper, accented the arches of her eyebrows.

“It’s nice like that. It does something to your face.”

In his own face, she saw there was something she couldn’t quite read. Some kind of weight that she instinctively knew was distinct from the news about Dr. Proulx.

“I was kind of dreading coming here today as it was.”

She set down her own glass, sensing a great tide sweeping under her feet. Sometimes one bad thing followed another, over and over, and there was nothing you could do about it.

“I might be going to New York sooner than I planned,” he said. “I am, I mean.”

“Oh.” It was all her voice could manage. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known this day would come. But it was only May, surely he hadn’t sold all the inventory?

No, he hadn’t, he said. But he had seen a newsreel over the weekend, one that announced the same program Abby had talked about: the Works Progress Administration. The W.P.A. “The ironical thing is, Dr. Proulx mentioned this to me only last week. He thought it would be a great opportunity for me.” A similar, preliminary program in San Francisco had been so successful, the government putting artists to work painting murals on public buildings, he said, that the federal government was developing a broader program as part of the Emergency Relief Act. “You apply and if you’re accepted, you’re paid to paint.
To paint
. Easel paintings, sculptures, prints. It’s a way to earn money and get back to New York.”

She nodded with the restrained enthusiasm that good news, on the heels of news of a death, dictated, grateful for the excuse for restraint. Otherwise she’d have had to acknowledge how incredible it was to think that the government would actually pay someone to create art. Because it was incredible. “But how can you be sure you’d be chosen?”

“I think I’d get it. I’ve got the right background. I could make it happen.”

“But if the government is running the program, all the states will do it, won’t they?”

“There’s going to be a New England division, but getting back to New York’s always been my plan.”

“Won’t you have to be a resident?”

“My aunt lives there. I can use her address to start. I just need to come up with a proposal for my application, a good idea.”

“What about the inventory?”

“Al Stein’s going to take it off my hands. We made a good deal this morning. He gets a deep discount and I get enough cash to leave my mother in good shape for a while.”

“Oh.”

He gazed at her with something that looked too much like pity. Or maybe it was regret. “It’s an opportunity I can’t ignore, Dez. They’re saying we’ll be able to paint what we want. Of course, with the New Deal mentality, they might be wanting things that support patriotism, national pride, but we’ll see.”

Terrible how grief could bubble up like some compound in Asa’s back room. She forced herself not to blink, so her eyes wouldn’t spill. Through the blur, the fleshy middle of his lower lip looked the exact color of the mulberries that birds dropped on the back walkway, and she found herself wondering—anything to keep her composure—how to mix that shade.

“I know you’re disappointed,” he said. “I’ll miss our days, too.”

She was unable to manage a word against the rock lodged in her throat. How could she have thought she didn’t want him here, that she would be fine telling him to leave?

“What am I supposed to do, Dez? There are a hundred reasons to go and the only one that could make me stay is an option I have no right to.”

It was the first acknowledgment of what had been unspoken, and it was too much. She found herself running down to the river, mortified that she was running, that she had lost control of her emotions. She pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from crying, watching the river bubbling and sloshing over rocks and pebbles, like her painting, but not like her painting, which seemed so fine only an hour ago but looked nothing like this, suggested nothing like this.

She could sense him behind her. He was behind her on the grass.

“Dez.”

She inhaled deeply—
Get hold of yourself!
—and turned around, hands clasped together, voice as pleasant as she could manage. Of course she was happy for him, just a bit envious. She even managed a laugh.

He looked skeptical. “Are you sure?”

She didn’t know whether to admit her devastation or continue in the same prim, false vein. “What about that woman you see?” She couldn’t stop herself. “Ruth Sondheim?”

His face registered a kind of resigned surprise that she had remembered Ruth’s last name, could call it up so quickly.

“Ruth knows what’s what.” He didn’t want to talk about Ruth Sondheim, clearly, but she had to know, had to ask.

“Is she going to New York, too?”

“No, Dez.”

A lie? No, Jacob didn’t lie. Or maybe he did, how would she know? “Will you visit?”

“Of course I’ll visit.”

But it was unlikely. She knew that, even if he did not.

She sat down on the bench by the riverbank, a place she hadn’t sat since the day her father died. She sat on the bench and imagined her father beside her, talking and breathing then ceasing to exist less than an hour later. Nothing in life lasted, nothing stayed the same. You were a fool if you got to a certain age and still grieved about that hard fact, or railed at it. Maybe you had to at least look on the bright side of change.